Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  “Oh, she really knows how to push my buttons. Bitching and bitching—”

  Cole slaps both hands on his father’s chest, the rocker tipping back, and grabs his pajama top in his fists, pulls him up and throws him against the wall. The sampler hanging there, a poem about mortality stitched by a little girl now dead for a hundred years, shoots off the wall, frame and glass shattering on the floor. They both stare down at it, then Cole looks across the room at Ian, who at last has lifted his face. He’s turned toward Cole, gently nodding. In the kitchen doorway, Kelly’s nodding too. He glances at his father leaning against the wall, and even he seems to be slowly, pleadingly nodding. Cole takes a big step forward and swings, expecting a crisp thwack like in the movies, but his father’s nose crunches, his head slams into the plaster, and he gives a deep, quiet grunt. Before he falls, Cole swings again and catches him on the jaw and then—once he’s on the floor—drops on top of him, swinging blindly, his father’s glasses long gone, some of the punches on hard skull, others on the softer cheek and the side of his neck. And he isn’t fighting back at all, so what stops Cole’s furious assault are Kelly and Ian pulling on his bare shoulders, trying to get him off their father, but he keeps swinging until finally Kelly grabs him by the hair and yanks him away. Cole turns and sees their horrified faces, both running with tears. “What are you, fucking crazy?” Kelly screams. “You’re gonna kill him!” She’s been screaming for a time, and she still is. Ian’s cowering, and his father has rolled onto his side, moaning, his hands covering his head. Kelly hauls Cole to his feet by his hair. He steps on the fireplace poker, and when his sister lets go, seizes it with both hands, raises it above his head, and thumps it like a sledgehammer into his father’s back. He tries to pull the poker loose, but the hooked end is lodged under the shoulder blade. He jerks, and his father cries out. The blood puddles warm around his bare feet.

  * * *

  —

  The smell of smoke that comes in with the cops is a relief, a new sensation; they’ve been to the burning shed tonight. One of them lifts their mother’s eyelids and looks at her pupils with a flashlight. The other stares at the folded bath towel that Kelly has pressed to their father’s back, now soaked with blood, then he says, “Your name, sir?” and, when there’s no reply, “Can you hear me, sir?”

  Once the ambulance arrives, they don’t take their mother, just their father. Cole has a swollen spot the size of a cherry on his right hand, but he keeps it tucked under his arm, sitting there on the floor beside Ian, who hasn’t moved from this spot for an hour, still twisted up like a heap of limbs. Kelly kneels on the other side of their brother, her arm over his back, his head tapping on his knee more slowly now, a metronome for a dirge losing time.

  “My brother tried to fight him off,” Kelly says. “He tried to protect her. To protect all of us.” As the cop examines the black eye Cole got from the corner of the bureau, Cole confirms everything his sister says and adds details of his own, telling the story of the fight he’d always wanted: his father coming at him with fists raised and Cole striking back hard and decisively. He’ll go through years of his life wanting that fight, a real fight instead of this one-sided beating, resenting his father for not delivering on his end.

  There will be more questions later at the hospital after they put him in a cast from the elbow down. “Boxer’s break,” the nurse will say. The fifth metacarpal in his right hand. They’ll pick the broken glass from his feet. There will be interviews and counseling and through it all Cole will stick to Kelly’s version of events, which included nothing of what actually happened, and their father—two weeks in the hospital—will never contradict it. And over the decades Nikki will innocently help him shape it into the only story he could possibly live with.

  * * *

  —

  Cool, damp air brushes his face and he wakes from the sleep that carried him deep into the night. He pulls the blanket up over his shoulders. Daniel’s next to him, and just beyond, his father’s uncuffed and curled in a tight ball. The sun shows through the treetops to the east.

  Stiff and sore, Cole slowly gets to his feet and crosses the yard, an overwhelming smell of wet, charred wood, of a doused campfire. The chimney’s still standing. And so is the far front corner: the parlor below and his bedroom above. The fire went wild once the roof collapsed and it became more a matter of waiting for it to burn out than extinguishing the flames, and that’s when Cole fell asleep. But at some point in the night he was awoken by a truck, the headlights casting their beam fifty yards out into the field…and he gasped: caught in the sudden wash of watery light he saw the ghostly figure of Little Kirk, as if he were floating there before turning away and running through the burnt, rotting tobacco and disappearing into the weeds edging the swamp. Then the truck backed onto the road and the lights swept away like a black curtain dropping.

  The cop’s gone. Only three firefighters remain, rolling up wet hoses, their truck idling. There’s coffee and a box of Hostess powdered-sugar donuts on its chrome sideboard. He steps around the currant bushes to the pear trees, stretches out the front of his shirt, and fills it like a sack with a dozen pears snapped from the branches, then brings them to the truck and lines them up one by one on the chrome. Over the clucking diesel engine he tells the men, “They’re still a little crisp but plenty sweet,” and he crunches into one.

  Where the first floor caved in he can see into the cellar, the beehive chimney base, the ancient asbestos-wrapped furnace. When the house was built in 1780, there was no Connecticut Shade growing in the fields, no pavement on Old Newgate Road, no Hostess donuts or Styrofoam coffee cups. But surely there was brutality. Along with brass candlesticks and ladder-back chairs, angry men passed their violence to their children. And surely sons rose up against their fathers, the same blood surging in their veins.

  Across the yard, Daniel’s sitting there straightening the blanket covering his grandfather. He stands up and gazes toward the house. When he sees Cole, he tilts his cheek to his hands pressed flat together: He’s sleeping. Then he ducks under the apple trees and takes a leak in the weeds. All summer Daniel’s been saying they should go home. Why the hell didn’t Cole listen? Last night they witnessed violence handed down through generations—an old story Cole knows by heart—but where are the accounts of legacy handed backward, of the father learning from his son?

  Daniel crawls back under his blanket and pulls it up over his face against the light. Cole slides his hands down in his pockets and leans on the rumbling truck. It occurs to him that his wallet got burned in the fire—credit cards, a little cash, all of his ID. But at the bottom of his pocket he feels the chestnut rings. In the sunlight he admires Alex’s stellar lathe work, Antoine’s precise carving; they, like their gift, make an inspiring pair. He slips one on his ring finger and the other on his pinkie.

  He needs to tell Nikki, once and for all, exactly what happened that night. From the start he told her a story closer to Kelly’s than the truth, and his attempts to correct the record through the years have been half-hearted. Anyway, they both preferred the story she’s come to tell, continually revised to affirm his heroism. The more times she told it, the truer it seemed.

  Tires screech, and then the yellow Cadillac lurches onto the tractor road and skids to a stop in the dirt. The driver’s door flies open and Andrew sprints toward Cole, shouting, “Is everybody okay? What happened?”

  “Everyone’s fine.”

  Andrew is panting, still in a fright, rubbing his knee. “So you all got out?”

  “Yes, we did,” Cole says. “Is that Sandy and Faye in the car?”

  He nods. “We’re meeting Sandy’s brother in Suffield for breakfast and came this way to see the house.”

  “You just missed it!” Cole jokes, but he can’t get the look of devastation off Andrew’s face.

  Beyond the weeping willow, Sandy’s helping her mother from the car and then le
ading her over the yard. Andrew’s staring into the ruins, entranced. He’s thinking, Cole suspects, that the house has been smoldering for thirty years, a funeral pyre that’s nearly, finally, extinguished.

  And his own thoughts are much the same, starting with the resignation he felt when Daniel convinced him it was too late to put out the fire. He could feel himself letting go of this house and its traumas, letting go of the simmering rage that’s haunted him. He watched as the cycle of violence was reduced to ash.

  He didn’t realize his father was awake but sees him now examining the yellow car, then hurrying after the women. Cole meets them on the grass and says, “Hello, Faye,” then hugs Sandy as Phil, out of breath, catches up and scrutinizes all three of them. When Andrew turns from the embers to stare dead at his brother-in-law, Cole fears the worst.

  But Faye inadvertently breaks the tension, addressing Phil with an air of boasting. “For quite some time I lived with my late husband in France.”

  “My wife lived there,” he says. “Rosemary.”

  Everyone stiffens, except for Faye, who touches her forehead as if to remember: “She died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Phil says, his face turning white.

  * * *

  —

  The sun has risen halfway to noon and Cole sits down next to Daniel, who’s thrown off the blanket but is still asleep, with his arm flung over his eyes. Phil’s holding Faye by the elbow and leading her to the chicken coop. The chickens seem to delight her. The more they cluck, the more she laughs.

  Cole presses his nose to his sleeping son’s scalp, and he’s fifteen years back in time, at dawn, in front of the woodstove he’s just stoked to warm the dampness out of the house; baby Daniel has fallen asleep at Nikki’s breast, and she lays him down on the bed between them, swaddled and hot as a coal, his lips still creamy and puckered; he and Nikki roll to their sides and cocoon him, their foreheads and knees touching. Contained in that small, sweet space is everything that matters.

  His phone rings and by the time he gets it out of his pocket, Daniel stirs. Cole looks at the screen: Nikki.

  21

  The rich scent of chestnut and tobacco completely envelops him when he walks into the shop, like he’s entering a cloud of leaves curing in a loaded shed. He flips on the overhead lights and can hardly believe all the wood—a stack as neat and massive as a wooden ship, an arc—that has divinely appeared under the roof. He walks the length of it, from the roll-up doors all the way to the back wall. Seventy feet. A few boards that Ben has run through the planer are laid out on the table saw. He smooths his palm along the grain, figured like smoke.

  He raises his forearm to his nose. For days afterward the smell of smoke stayed on his skin, and even now he thinks he sometimes catches a whiff on Daniel. As he was leaving for the airport the day after the fire, Daniel reached into a jumble of half-burnt lumber and wiggled loose an iron nail—not a little one for lath but a 16-penny framing nail, forged and shaped by hand, that he now keeps on his dresser.

  He’ll always smell that burning house when he remembers saying goodbye to his father at the VA in Hartford, where he’s getting the tests he needs. In a matter of weeks he’ll be living at the Charter Oak, on their top floor, in Memory Care.

  At home he spreads out the plans for the family room on the kitchen table. Some of their September work fell through, so he’s putting a couple of his guys on the framing as soon as the foundation is done. Daniel wants to work on the addition, too. Since learning he doesn’t have to go back to Connecticut for a trial—LK took two guilty pleas, sharing the second with his father—his spirits have been high. He started his junior year yesterday—all forgiven at the high school. A clean slate.

  Cole hears the shower turn off in the upstairs bathroom. Nikki is drying her shoulders, her arms, her thighs. The bathroom window is open to a sunny Oregon September afternoon. Her skin is moist from the steam. When she steps lightly with bare feet down the hall to their bedroom, he closes his eyes and listens, because she’s singing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For friendship, support, and inspiration I’m grateful to Gary Fisketjon, Genevieve Nierman, Abby Endler, Kim Witherspoon, Maria Whelan, Alexis Hurley, Claire Friedman, Nathaniel Jacks, Patrick Dillon, Tanya Katz, W. Wilson Keithline, Jason Brown, Sara Jameson, Peter Betjemann, Joy Jensen, Tim Jensen, David Vann, Peter Wogan, Aria Minu-Sepehr, Sean Crouch, David Robinson, Christopher McKnight Nichols, OSU Center for the Humanities, and my colleagues in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film. To John Daniel for Looking After: A Son’s Memoir, the Corvallis Fire Department for their generosity, Bob Grigg and Gregg Mangan for their research on Old Newgate Prison, and Nick Van-Olden and Brandon Seettje for a day in the sheds and under the nets picking Connecticut Shade. And I’m grateful to my family—Jen, Luke, and Chloe—for their constant and boundless love.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Keith Scribner grew up in Troy, New York, and then East Granby, Connecticut, in the heart of the state’s broadleaf- and shade-tobacco country. His previous novels are The Oregon Experiment, Miracle Girl, and The GoodLife, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. He has lived and worked in Japan, Turkey, and France and currently teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he lives with his wife, the poet Jennifer Richter, and their children.

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